Cultural Appropriation

I'm really trying to get my head around this one, Gentle Reader.  I don't have enough information to be able to form an opinion and really it's none of my business.  When I first heard about First Nations folks getting their breechcloths in a knot about dumb young white guys wearing feather headdresses during music festivals I almost wanted to ask some of them, "Who pissed in your pemmican?"  So, I listened to stuff on the CBC and soon thought I discerned a genuine and justifiable anger in some of our aboriginal citizens.  The narrative goes that any marginalized and oppressed minority has special ownership rights over their cultural symbols and heritage.  This means no ignorant mimicking and it certainly forbids imitating aboriginal art and other cultural features by anyone who, well, is not aboriginal.

I heard some more about it yesterday on the CBC and then I just got angry.  At the indignant First Nations people who want laws enacted forbidding cultural appropriation.  Today I have swung a bit back towards the left and feel some sympathy.

Here is what I currently understand.  Our First Nations People are survivors of a lengthy cultural genocide.  For many decades their children were carted off to residential schools where they were forbidden to express any of their culture: religion, language, art, nothing.  The objective was to kill the Indian in the child.  Potlatches, all celebrations of native culture were outlawed for many years.  They were all expected to dress, behave, live, worship and believe like white people.  Broken and traumatized.

In recent years many aboriginals are reclaiming their cultural heritage, including feather headdresses and breechcloths.  They are entitled to this.   When I hear well-meaning, and not very well-meaning white people grumble that they should just get on with their lives and stop whining it is very clear to me that they are not really getting it.  A historically traumatized and destroyed people is not just going to get off their butt and move on and become happy productive make-believe white people.  They need time to go through all the stages of grief for their destroyed culture and identity, and part of doing this is going to involve returning to familiar cultural lodestones, such as feather headdresses.  They will in time move forward with this but these people are reclaiming their heritage.  They are justifiably and understandably angry and tolerance is not going to be one of their selling points.

I don't think that it's really relevant for me to have an opinion about this right now.  I do want to understand it better.  By the way, I would never take offence should I see a native person suddenly decked out in a Scottish kilt (my dad's side of the family) or German lederhosen (my mother's side).  But last I heard, neither Scottish nor German cultures have ever been in danger of extermination by an occupying power.